When health and human performance professor Lesley Scibora stressed to students that cellphones were not to be used during class, something about that emphasis stuck with junior Chris Hornung.

So, after reading a book about reclaiming conversations and considering doing research on how cellphone use by students at St. Thomas fit in, he approached Scibora for direction. Not because it was directly in her field (“I didn’t know if it was something she would go for at all,” Hornung said) but because he had gotten to know her throughout the semester and felt comfortable approaching her.

“It really just kind of clicked,” Hornung said.

Since then Scibora has helped Hornung connect with other resources on campus to kick-start his ongoing research project, which has continued under her guidance. Looking back on how the whole process played out, it was surprising to Hornung how organically such a strong mentor-mentee relationship flourished.

“I was looking for a mentor, but I don’t think when I got into conversation with Lesley that’s anything I had in mind. … It kind of just happened. I just got a mentor. It’s great,” he said. “I don’t feel I had to necessarily work to try to find one; it kind of came out of nowhere. It was in the back of my mind, and I didn’t think I had a mentor until I realized I had one.”

Countless similar relationships have cropped up between students and faculty at St. Thomas, especially when research can be a catalyst for more time together outside the classroom.

“You get to see them grow and learn something in an area that totally interests them. It’s what jazzes them, and you can get behind it and support it,” Scibora said. “You see them grow and learn and take responsibility and leadership. What’s better than helping provide an opportunity and letting them run with that?”

Scibora said it’s no accident she ends up with multiple students asking to work with her in any given semester; she “plants seeds” in class and makes a point to be available to everyone if they want to pursue something with her.

“I try to show up to class early, talk with them, get to know them. And I make it a point the first day of class to let them know that I’m here to help them succeed. I’m here to help you learn and be successful. They always know I’m on their side, and to me that’s important they know that,” she said. “That has made for good relationships with my students.”

“I didn’t think I would be doing research, but the ability to have a relationship with your professors is there, here at St. Thomas. You get in contact with them, they’re always there before classes to talk about the course or talk in general,” Hornung said. “Conversation opened up the avenue to build a relationship and then to do research and have other opportunities in general.”

Scibora said she has been impressed with Hornung’s ambition and independence, while Hornung pointed out the benefit of having someone like Scibora in his corner.

“I just think it’s awesome, and I think the school does allow those relationships to grow. It allows that mentor relationship more so than other schools,” Hornung said. “The idea you can get in contact and have off-the-cuff conversations and not be intimidated, and that you can talk with professors and not a [teacher’s assistant] or something; you can go right to the person with all that knowledge. It’s great.”

Editor’s note: One of the most common benefits students cite about their St. Thomas education is the ability to connect personally with faculty members, which supports students’ academic work and their growth as people; the value of knowing they are “not just a number” is immeasurable for students. With the “Tommie Mentors and Mentees” series, the Newsroom has sought to illustrate what that value means for specific student-faculty pairs.

The Office of Academic Affairs is pleased to announce affirmative decisions on promotion and tenure following the conclusion of the Tenure and Promotion Committee meetings in December 2016 and February 2017.

The following tenured members of the faculty were promoted, effective Sept. 1, 2017:

Craig Eliason, Department of Art History, College of Arts and Sciences, promoted to professor

Mariana Hernandez Crespo Gonstead, School of Law, promoted to professor

Olga Herrera, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, promoted to associate professor

William Junker, Department of Catholic Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, promoted to associate professor

Robert Kahn, School of Law, promoted to professor

Avinash Malshe, Department of Marketing, Opus College of Business, promoted to professor

Lorina Quartarone, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, College of Arts and Sciences, promoted to professor

The following members of the faculty were granted tenure, effective Sept. 1, 2017:

Timothy Mead, Department of Health and Human Performance, College of Arts and Sciences

The following members of the faculty were granted tenure and were promoted simultaneously to associate professor, effective Sept. 1, 2017:

Scott Carl, Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity

Bryana French, Graduate School of Professional Psychology, College of Education, Leadership and Counseling

Jerry Husak, Department of Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Mark McInroy, Department of Theology, College of Arts and Sciences

Debra Monson, Department of Teacher Education, College of Education, Leadership and Counseling

Salina Renninger, Graduate School of Professional Psychology, College of Education, Leadership and Counseling

Hassan Salamy, Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Engineering

Joshua Stuchlik, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Sciences

Muer Yang, Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Opus College of Business

Please remember in your prayers Bridget Duoos. She was the chair of the Department of Health and Human Performance and a St. Thomas professor since 1995. She died Tuesday after a short battle with cancer.

As recently as two months ago Duoos was teaching in the classroom, mentoring her research students and advising many more, all while chairing a successful and growing department. “We have lost an excellent colleague, a generous friend and an inspiring role model,” said Terence Langan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Bridget began working at St. Thomas in 1995 when she joined what was then the Department of Physical Education. During her more than 20-year tenure, she worked with her colleagues to build the department into today’s Department of Health and Human Performance, with hundreds of students majoring in exercise science, health promotion, public health studies, and physical and health education for teaching candidates.

She particularly enjoyed getting students involved in research. According to Langan, “Health and human performance is one of our more successful departments in terms of student research. This is due in large part to the curriculum that Bridget and her colleagues built, including the research methods course that she so loved to teach.”

Since 2009, her professional accomplishments included a book, more than a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles, more than two dozen peer-reviewed conference presentations and nearly five dozen student research presentations. Her professional colleagues honored her with a statewide award and a regional award during that same time period in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

“I know that all of us are dedicated to our students or else we wouldn’t be here. But somehow Bridget seemed to take that dedication to another level (or two or three),” said Langan. “She was so proud of her students and her department.”

A memorial service will take place at 2 p.m. Friday, June 24, at Cambridge Lutheran Church, 621 Old North Main St. in Cambridge. Visitation will be held one hour prior to services at the church.

On a muggy April afternoon in St. Paul, Christopher Michaelson stood in front of a class of St. Thomas undergraduates and lectured about business ethics and instances where relying on supply and demand can fail the market.

That probably sounds just about what you’d expect from an associate professor of ethics and business law, right?

But the class answering Michaelson’s queries about what role ethics should play in business and what role business should play in setting drug prices wasn’t a business class at all. Instead, members of Amy Finnegan’s sociology class were stepping up to the challenge. The day before had seen the opposite play out, where Finnegan had crossed the river to Michaelson’s business class on the Minneapolis campus to talk sociology and justice and peace studies.

Several faculty swapped classes in anticipation of the World Café event the following week: Classes from the departments of Business, Theology, Sociology, Justice and Peace Studies (JPST), Biology, and Health and Human Performance all gathered at the end of April to discuss HIV and AIDS; what the concerns around that topic were from their respective disciplines; and how they could work together for more effective problem-solving in regard to the HIV and AIDS pandemic, as well as future global health issues.

Creating a World Cafe event

While this was the first year that the World Café was this large at St. Thomas, business and JPST classes have participated in the past. They centered around the themes of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum, which focuses on the work of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and other international issues of peace building. At St. Thomas, the classes had a faculty member from the opposite discipline discuss the topic through his or her respective lens, and all the students would come together for discussion at a culminating event.

There are many benefits to such an event. One of the primary objectives is for students to consider a topic from an interdisciplinary view with the hope they’ll consider more perspectives as they continue their education and head out into careers.

“What St. Thomas provides is a liberal arts education,” said Mary Maloney, an associate professor of management in the Opus College of Business, on why she decided to join the project. “The essence of liberal arts is to get exposure to a variety of disciplines and to use that knowledge and training to help you problem-solve and think critically.”

In addition, students can learn how to work more effectively with disciplines that can sometimes seem to be at odds.

“On some college campuses, there are stereotypes: on one hand, that business students are sell-out money-grubbers, and on the other hand, that arts and sciences students are idealists who will eventually face reality and become business people at some point in their careers,” Michaelson said. “Just having these different majors get together and realize that they’re all humans can be eye-opening. The business students aren’t uncaring about a crisis like HIV/AIDS and have knowledge that can contribute to a solution. Meanwhile, the non-business students aren’t impractical, and their knowledge is also essential to solving complex problems collaboratively.”

When the Nobel Peace Prize Forum moved into the summer, faculty decided they wanted to keep the World Café event going; they picked their own topic and expanded the number of disciplines and departments involved. This year, Finnegan, Mike Klein and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer came from JPST; from business, Maloney and Michaelson; Paul Wojda from Theology; Starr Sage from the Health and Human Performance Department; Steven Bennett from the Biology Department; and Roxanne Prichard from the Psychology Department.

After considerate time and deliberation, they selected HIV/AIDS as their topic, believing it was a subject all the disciplines could contribute to and would challenge students in a meaningful way.

“We wanted each discipline to have something meaningful to bring to the table,” Klein said. “It’s a pressing social issue, but it doesn’t get as much attention as it might need to.”

The faculty each had one or two classes involved in the project, and they prepared their students by swapping with another faculty member in the group. Faculty talked about the broad issues someone in their field would consider in regard to HIV/AIDS. For example, Sage talked about the ethics of doing research in resources-poor communities that may not be able to eventually afford the treatments that are tested on them, while Bennett discussed the biological aspects of HIV/AIDS, such as the early history in the early 1900s in West Africa.

The students were also asked to watch Wilhemina’s War, a PBS documentary that explores the story of a black family living in the rural south – a population disproportionately affected by HIV within the U.S. The film was intended to make more personal an abstract idea that is often thought of playing out primarily in developing nations.

“That sense of inserting yourself into a person’s experience is the issue we’re trying to cover,” Klein said. “PBS did a great job of complicating those two simple categories of HIV and AIDS to talk about how race, class, education and access to health care are part of the story and part of the analysis.”

Forging connections

After the students had time to soak in all that information, around 240 of them came together on the evening of Wednesday, April 27, for the World Café event, which is inspired by the World Café Method, a flexible and effective way of holding large-group dialogues.

The students were put into small groups, with each group having a blended mix of departments. They went through three rounds of questions, which they were supposed to consider through the lens of their respective disciplines, and after each question, they would swap to a new group.

“When you move to the new table, you’re bringing yourself, but you’re also bringing the ideas and experiences from the first round and other people are doing the same,” Finnegan said.

The first round focused on explaining the causes of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; the second on what has been learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic; and the third on what should be done now.

Several of the students described the experience as “eye-opening,” because they hadn’t considered such a multidimensional approach before or because they were learning more about HIV/AIDS, which can still be a taboo topic.

“For me, personally, and for, I think, a lot of the classmates I talked to, I really had no idea how [HIV/AIDS] affects so many people,” sophomore Anika Johnson said. “It’s got a heavy social stigma around it. By talking, learning and being more educated, we can start to eliminate the stigma, and maybe do more fundraising for research to make the make drugs more available, if it were looked at more like breast cancer.”

The experience was also empowering for many students, who believed they walked away with a better understanding of how to enact change.

“We have this community of scholars and Tommies, and it was this moment of, ‘We have the tools to do something. We have this collaboration,’” said third-year student Tatjana Mortell.

“I think this interdisciplinary approach is something students and officials around the world need to take into account when allocating resources,” echoed Elizabeth Mauk ’16.

For many of the faculty members who were involved, that sort of feedback was exactly why they had involved their classes in the first place.

“It complicates things. I think that’s my favorite part about this event,” Klein said. “[Good interdisciplinary] work takes us out of our silo or our discipline and challenges us to realize that we have to connect across these differences.”

That held true for many of the faculty members as well, who forged new connections: Finnegan and Michaelson plan to co-teach a class together soon, while Klein is taking some of the research that Prichard discussed on the science behind storytelling to shake up a writing component in one of his courses in the fall.

The committee of faculty involved hope to hold the event again next year, with a new topic, and also that the World Café event may serve as an example or inspiration for other curricular efforts across campus.

“It’s important for us to create spaces to have conversations, to have conversations with people we don’t see eye to eye with or are from really different backgrounds,” Sage said. “We’re not going to come up with the solutions to any of the world’s problems, whether it be infectious diseases [or anything else], unless we’re able to cross those boundaries.”

Why would anyone choose to strenuously exert themselves on a treadmill, jaws pried open by a wide tube, until they’re breathing so laboriously they froth at the mouth? There’s a name for this unique brand of masochism. It’s called a VO2 max test. If you’re a physically fit person looking for a tangible method to track your aerobic endurance and set serious fitness goals, it’s a great resource, despite the likelihood that when you finish you may resemble a rabid animal on the verge of heat stroke.

If you’re still with me, read on for my firsthand account of what a VO2 max feels like. Currently, only students in St. Thomas’ Health and Human Performance Department perform the tests as part of their lab requirements, but the HHP Department is working toward offering this service to the St. Thomas community on a limited basis in the near future. A VO2 max test provides athletes – whether professional or recreational – accurate, personalized data they can use to tailor their training and reach their goals.

VO2 max explained

Translated literally, V represents “volume”; O2, “oxygen”; and max is short for “maximum.” In other words, the test measures the most oxygen a person can process. Dr. Paul Mellick, an assistant professor in the HHP Department, explained it well: “As you stand at rest your body uses ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is a biochemical your body uses to help create energy, just to keep your cells alive. For the average person at rest, they use about 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight. But when you exercise, obviously that number goes up because more energy is required, and therefore more oxygen is required to transfer that energy to the systems that need it. The more fit you are, the more oxygen you should be able to use because you’re better able to transfer more energy.”

This is, essentially, what a VO2 max test measures. The higher your VO2 max, the better shape you’re in. For males 18 to 25, the range for above-average VO2 max is between 47 and 60 mL per kilogram of body weight per minute (mL/kg/min); for women in the same age bracket, the range is 42 to 56. Men’s maxes tend to run higher than women’s because they have greater body size and, in effect, greater blood volume. Averages drop slightly with each successive age group. In general, we peak at age 20.

What accounts for a person’s VO2 max? It’s mostly about the blood, because blood is what transports oxygen to muscles and organs. The more one has, and the more hemoglobin-packed, the better. Other factors? A powerful heart to push all that blood where it needs go, as well as high capillary and mitochondrial density in the muscles.

Genetics definitely play a role, Mellick said, but virtually anyone can improve on their max through physical conditioning. “If you look at a guy like Lance Armstrong (VO2 max reportedly around 84) … that guy can bike really fast, which means there’s tons of energy being transferred, which means he’s going to use a lot of oxygen. That’s accomplished by adaptations in your heart and in your muscles.”

Athletic experts generally agree that a training program that incorporates regular exercise at 70 to 80 percent of your VO2 max will result in those heightened adaptations.

Fun facts … to the max

The highest VO2 max Mellick has ever recorded was for a 22-year-old male All-American cross-country runner at St. Thomas, who measured 80 mL/kg/min. The second best, also by a St. Thomas men’s cross-country runner in his early 20s, was 77. The third? Seventy-six, in a professional kickboxer in his late 20s during Mellick’s graduate school days in North Carolina: “He was just a freak of nature, and he’d never taken a VO2 max test. We asked him how long he’d run before and he said, ‘Never more than a mile at a time.’ He had some genetics.”

All three scores, though phenomenal, are not even close to the current world record, 97.5, set in 2012 by then 18-year-old Oskar Svendsen, a Norwegian cyclist and the 2012 junior world time trial champion. Svendsen bested longtime VO2 max record holder Bjorn Daehlie, a 12-time Olympic medalist in cross-country skiing, who recorded a 96 in a test taken during one of his off seasons.

The test

Before I stepped on the treadmill, Mellick handed me a Garmin heart rate monitor, which I strapped around my chest. It measured my heart rate, which was analyzed in comparison to the changes in my oxygen output throughout the test. To my head, he snugly fastened a clunky apparatus – equal parts orthodontic headgear, scuba mask and horse blinkers – made mostly of plastic and neoprene.

“It’ll take some getting used to,” he forewarned.

He then asked for my best guess on a pace I could comfortably hold on a flat road but that was also challenging. “You should last anywhere between seven and 14 minutes,” Mellick said. “If it’s less than seven, it means the speed we chose was too fast. If it goes longer than 14, it was too easy.”

The headgear held in place a long plastic breathing tube with a mouthpiece on one end. It essentially propped my mouth wide open so I couldn’t swallow or speak. Otherwise, it wasn’t that uncomfortable.

Mellick plugged the other end into a Parvo Medics metabolic cart – a $20,000 piece of equipment that analyzed my exhaled gasses – stationed beside the treadmill. (Contrary to popular belief, the air we exhale is less than 5 percent carbon dioxide, the rest roughly 16 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen in a person at rest.) It’s the same device NASA uses to ensure their astronauts are adequately fit to do time in outer space. The cart was attached to a laptop loaded with specialized software.

From the laptop, he had the ability to incrementally increase the intensity at which I ran by raising the incline by 2 percent every two minutes. Based on that, I should eventually reach an all-out effort that I had to try to sustain as long as I can. During that painful and short-lived space my body would move from aerobic metabolism to anaerobic metabolism, and my VO2 max number would be revealed. The idea is that the test would end only when my muscles were too fatigued to continue.

Mellick explained that during the test he would ask me every minute or so to signal my perceived physical state via a hand signal. Thumbs up meant, “I’m fantastic. VO2 max test? What VO2 max test?!”; palm-down and tremulous was, “I’m fading”; and thumbs down translated to, “Stop this insanity now.” He also mentioned that, at St. Thomas, they use a treadmill versus a stationary bicycle to administer the test because running is a more natural movement to most people.

While he gave me the run-down, drool seeped from the corners of my mouthpiece. He noticed my self-consciousness.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot to tell you. You’ll probably drool,” he said. “Everyone does. Don’t worry about it.” Then he tapped a key on the laptop and the belt started to move. The test was beginning.

After a short warm-up, he increased the pace to the “challenging but doable” speed I held through the test.

For the first two minutes I felt sprite. After the first incline raise, my breathing thickened, and the back of my throat was uncomfortably dry.

After five minutes, saliva sputtered from my mouthpiece.

By the third increase, I was glaring at the digital clock on the laptop monitor. 6:05. I’d hoped to last 10 minutes, but I was already struggling.

“How you doing, Kelly?” Mellick asked on cue, delicately.

I signaled “I’m fading,” but somehow I held on for another two minutes. Throughout, Mellick inquired about my physical state more of often, about every 30 seconds.

Immediately after the fourth rise, a surge of lactic acid flooded my quads, the headgear suddenly felt 10 pounds heavier, and I had to focus hard to stabilize my breathing. Within a minute I flashed him a “thumbs down.”

“Fifteen more seconds?” he prodded, to which I reluctantly signaled “thumbs up.” I can do this, I thought, but my eyes were fixated on the laptop clock, counting down every second. My once-upright running form was crumbling.

“Fifteen more?” he asked again, trying to eek a bit more out of me. This time I emphatically signaled, “thumbs down.” I’d endured a little more than nine minutes. My cheeks were brightly flushed, my chest heaving erratically, my legs burning. I was spent.

Next stop: The Olympic games?

Once I’d cooled down, I didn’t walk away with just a sweaty shirt. Mellick handed me a print-out packed with personal data – hard numbers that reflected all the nooks and crannies of my cardiovascular fitness. The most important figures are RER – respiratory exchange ratio – which measures CO2 in versus CO2 out and most importantly, VO2/kg STPD mL/kg/min: the number that marks the exact point at which my oxygen consumption plateaued while my exercise intensity increased – my VO2 max.

“Most people, when they’re figuring out their target training heart rate, are setting it based on the standardized equation for their age group, which is 220 minus their age.” Mellick said. “That’s not very accurate.”

He pointed to my VO2 max – 47 – on the printout, then drew my attention to my heart rate the second I hit it: 200. Under his calculations, I should be training between 140-160 heartbeats per minute, well under 179, where the all-purpose formula would have put me.

With this information, I can set forth on my lifelong quest to make the U.S. Olympic marathon team. Or I can crash train to run a blistering speed in this year’s turkey trot. Probably the latter.

It’s 3:34 p.m. on a Thursday, and seniors Sophie Gottsman and Jordan McGowan are the only people in the Anderson Athletic and Recreation Center cardio room not on their way to breaking a sweat. Watch them for a couple of minutes, though, and it’s clear they’re not avoiding work of their own.

The crisp polo shirts they’re wearing help signal that the pair are here for business. A clipboard and pencil add to the picture of professional attention. With a water bottle dangling from her left hand, Gottsman walks along a line of four men see-sawing their arms and legs on elliptical machines.

“How did those last two sets of intervals feel?” she asks one, cocking her head to the side and flashing a half smile that hints at the unsaid follow-up: I know they were tough.

The response – despite coming mid-workout – is a positive one: “It felt good. Better than it would have a month ago.”

That type of exchange will play out several more times in the next half-hour before Gottsman and McGowan head down the hall to an empty aerobics room. A sweaty crew of men will trail behind them like ducks in a row.

The men are a dozen students at the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity, St. Thomas’ graduate seminary program located on the south campus; Gottsman and McGowan are undergraduate students in the Health and Human Performance Department’s Exercise Science 432 class. Together, the seminarians and HHP students are part of the Fit For Ministry program, a first-of-its-kind experiment at St. Thomas offering seminarians a comprehensive health and training experience and HHP students the opportunity to design, implement and lead real training. At first glance, the two groups at St. Thomas are quite different, yet together they have created something incredible: a semester-long illustration of collaboration, education, friendship and growth.

‘The program just exploded’

Catholic priestly training includes four pillars of formation: intellectual, spiritual, pastoral and human. A large part of the human pillar is being physically healthy, and the lack of training in physical wellness at the Saint Paul Seminary seemed like a pressing need to Father Allen Kuss. Kuss was a military priest for 20 years before coming to the Saint Paul Seminary in 2011, so some of the lack of attention to physical fitness and diet at his new civilian posting was obvious to him from the beginning.

“I saw it right away,” Kuss says. “But I didn’t know what to do about it.”

He found his answer last summer across Cretin and Summit avenues on north campus at the AARC, where he approached HHP Department faculty about putting together some kind of training program for the seminary.

“He described it very beautifully and it resonated with us. He sees their health and wellness as an integral part of their spiritual health,” HHP professor Lesley Scibora says. “We just said, ‘Absolutely.’”

HHP department chair Bridget Duoos adds, “He knows these individuals are preparing for a very stressful career and would need to deal with their health as they moved along. This was a great opportunity for us to say, ‘Yes, we have the knowledge and skill to help you out.’”

Soon after offering to work with Kuss and the seminary, the HHP faculty learned they were going to have more of a challenge than they had expected.

“We invited the seminarians to participate thinking we would maybe get 20, 25,” Scibora says. “We ended up getting 59. The program just exploded.”

That meant some major design shifts in how HHP students and faculty would handle the project. Each student in the Exercise Science 432 class took on about four seminarians instead of one or two. “Everyone was a little nervous about that at first,” senior HHP student Alex Altenbernd says. HHP also pulled in students enrolled in a bio-mechanics class to do gait analysis for each seminarian and asked St. Thomas’ health services to do blood profiles of the seminarians.

“It really has been a huge collaborative effort,” says adjunct professor Angela Effertz, who teaches Exercise Science 432 and took the lead in organizing the student training portion of the project.

Initial testing came at the outset of the fall semester, giving the seminarians and their trainers a baseline to work from for the next few months. It also provided data for an ongoing research project that will show the results of, by all accounts, a first-of-its-kind experiment anywhere with seminarians.

The study – titled simply, “Fit For Ministry” – has been approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board for research involving human subjects. It will use data from both the pre- and post-assessments to gauge “how a student-led fitness program impacts cardiovascular, strength and other fitness aspects for a group of seminarians,” Scibora says. That data will be evaluated throughout the spring and help inform the feasibility of continuing similar studies both at and outside St. Thomas.

“It’s not every day you get almost 60 people from one group willing to take part in a semester-long study like this,” Scibora says. “They’re very representative of the overall population, which is great for a study to make a valuable scientific contribution.”

Growing students

Once the baseline numbers were in place for each seminarian, the work on improving them began. Under the guidance of Effertz, HHP students designed weekly workout routines that helped move each seminarian toward his individual health goal. For some, the goal was to lose weight. For others, it was to learn more workout routines they could use in the future. For others, it was to gain a better understanding of an overall view of their health.

“They’re all varied and it can be hard to create a workout that suits everyone,” Gottsman says. “There are a few guys who ran the last Twin Cities Marathon next to some guys who are obese. Trying to accommodate all that is a skill.”

“Right away it was kind of overwhelming,” Altenbernd says. “You’re kind of playing it by ear and seeing how each day went.”

Effertz, Scibora and Duoos all described seeing – over the course of the first few weeks and throughout the semester – the HHP students embracing this professional role and its complex demands.

“I’ve really seen that come through in them. It’s fascinating watching them and how it has forced them to embrace this as a clinical situation as opposed to just a lab class,” Effertz says. “We teach, teach, teach all this stuff in the classroom, and then when it comes to the application it’s, ‘How do we connect it? How do we really take our students’ brilliance so they can use it to talk to someone else about what’s going on in their body?’ That’s what they’re doing with Fit For Ministry.”

Scibora seconds that view. “It was fun to see how much they grew in terms of professional development, skill development and their ability to interact in different situations with people they hadn’t met before,” she says. “It was very real world for them. They took it seriously and stepped up.”

The students also saw their own growth.

“My first day, I was so nervous. I was scared of my verbiage, how to approach (the seminarians) in a personal matter,” Gottsman says. “Once we got in there … we fell into the role and I wasn’t nervous. It has become very natural to be able to do this.”

Part of the reason Fit For Ministry could happen, Effertz says, is because HHP faculty already emphasize students’ active learning, rather than acquiring knowledge solely through lecture. Because hands-on learning has long been a benchmark of the department, giving students the responsibilities required for this project wasn’t exactly plotting a new course.

“This whole department excels in that area, giving students the opportunity to do things realistically,” Effertz says. “That’s what this program is built upon. It’s rare throughout the exercise science discipline. This is a very student-driven department … and what we saw in FFM is a representation of what other faculty do here in all of their classes. It’s so amazing. And the students really appreciate and recognize that.”

HHP students and faculty said a huge part of the program’s success was the buy-in from the seminarians.

“This was much needed. There hadn’t been much talk about physical fitness at the seminary because we have so much else to focus on,” seminarian Barry Reuwsaat says. “But it’s so important. It helps us relieve stress, work with mental clarity and just be healthier. I’m really thankful Father Kuss got this rolling.”

Kuss also secured the funding to equip every one of the participants with fitness trackers, which generated friendly competition as the seminarians counted their steps. More importantly, the program created a renewed focus on the importance of these men developing healthy habits they can carry forward when they are on their own as church leaders.

“You can’t just live a healthy lifestyle if you have no knowledge to draw from. This is setting us up for the future,” Reuwsaat says. “The connection of the body and soul, you can’t disconnect the two. We’re helping that (connection).”

Crossing campus

Duoos says HHP students were pleased to help foster that connection, too. “Our students have had this impact on a group who will go out into the community and will have an opportunity to make huge differences from their leadership positions. Sort of like teaching, you don’t realize how wide your net is cast when you train someone here who then goes out and influences a whole different group of people.”

Conversations have also allowed HHP students to learn about the seminary, an area of their university they otherwise might have never known, and about priests-in-training who showcase a high level of discipline and determination.

“As we are able to teach and guide the seminarians, I know many of the student trainers have learned a lot from them,” senior Sam Sutton says. “They show up to each training session with a positive attitude. Their schedules are very busy and each day is most likely not their best day, but they always show up motivated to work out.

“They not only want to learn about exercise, nutrition and other lifestyle choices, but they are genuinely interested in learning about us as people,” he adds. “This helped me better see the importance of relationships you make with others around you, no matter what type.”

Seminarians also benefited from getting to know the HHP students. “I think initially we were maybe a little scared of them and they were maybe a little scared of us. Some of these guys are on the football team, in great shape, and we’re seminarians from south campus,” seminarian TJ McKenzie says. “They’re hopefully seeing we’re not weird or anything, and we’re seeing them as people who have a lot to offer. We can learn a lot from each other.”

As St. Thomas continues to emphasize cross-collaboration between departments and groups across campus, Fit For Ministry has proven to be a showcase of what’s possible when two seemingly different groups of people come together.

“It’s a great example of how different disciplines can find a common language. In this case that common language is health and fitness, and a way to bring these seemingly disparate groups together to learn from each other,” Scibora says. “Our students learn from the seminarians and see the way they interact with one another, and the way they approach life and their health. The seminarians were able to see a completely different side of how they might view health and fitness. They came together on these topics and had a really interesting dialogue.”

Still climbing

Back in the aerobics room, Gottsman and McGowan lay down their workout mats as the seminarians spread out in a curving row across from them.

“We’re going to run through some of the same core exercises we’ve done in the past,” Gottsman says. “Let’s start with the bridge.”

Ten minutes later a fresh sweat gleams on the foreheads of most everyone in the room. Aloe Blac’s voice pumps over the speakers: “I’m the man, I’m the man, I’m the man, yes I am, yes I am, yes I am!”

“I can really feel that in my lower abs,” one seminarian admits as the seconds crawl by and he maintains a plank pose.

“Make sure you’re continuing to breathe and engaging your core,” Gottsman reminds them from her own planked position.

At the end of the session most of the seminarians linger, visiting with one another and their trainers before heading off in ones and twos to the locker room. It’s the final workout before Thanksgiving break and there are large meals all over the country to look forward to, after dietary indulgences during the fall have been much less common for the seminarians in Fit For Ministry.

Two months later Gottsman sits outside T’s in the Anderson Student Center, thinking back through that pre-holiday session and so many others that made up a semester’s worth of dedication and payoff.

“Saying goodbye to the seminarians was bittersweet. It was a lot of work off my shoulders, but it was sad because I enjoyed them so much,” she says. “It was a really, really good experience and an awesome opportunity. I’ve heard from other students that have taken this class last year and it was, ‘Wow, I’m bummed I didn’t get to do this.’”

If all goes well more students will get to take part in the future: HHP faculty and Kuss met after the semester to break down how things went and everyone came away hoping they can put together a similar program again.

“I asked Father Kuss to give me a sense on a continuum of how were your expectations met, or not met. He said, ‘Far exceeded,’” Scibora says. “That just spoke volumes to me. I thought, ‘OK, wow, this was really, really fantastic.’ He was just really pleased with how the men responded, we were so pleased with how our students stepped up to this professional challenge, and it all came together and exceeded expectations. It was a home run.”

Duoos notes, “To be able to see the pride (the HHP students) took in what they were doing, there was just so much student growth. They learned so much and to discover that what they learn can really make a difference, that’s such an important takeaway for them. They’re so proud of what they’re doing.”

There’s plenty to be proud of already and – with nearly 60 seminarians and seminary faculty ready to use what they’ve learned on a daily basis – there’s almost certainly going to be more to be proud of. Thousands of miles from the AARC in January, McKenzie and his peers were in the midst of proving that in Rome.

“I’m still wearing my Garmin Vivofit (fitness tracker) and I’m averaging 15 miles a day, but I’m not too sore because Fit For Ministry got me ready for it,” McKenzie says in an email. “Yesterday we climbed to the top of St. Peter’s (Basilica) and we didn’t choose to take the elevator since we wanted more steps in.”

There are 320 steps to the top of St. Peter’s Basilica. And it’s a good bet the members of the Fit For Ministry program won’t stop their climbing there.

That thought underscored everything last year as she dug through research articles, conversed with peers and professors, and tried to determine what she might look into for her required class project. Then a senior in Dr. Lesley Scibora’s Research Methods in Exercise Science course and zeroing in on completing a major in the Health and Human Performance Department, Hulstein discovered the kind of research gap that often means one of two things: “You either have something that no one cares about,” Scibora said, “Or something that is untapped and is important. … I think in Emily’s case it’s very important.”

That gap came between a wealth of studies on how adolescent mental development is tied to physical activity – as well as many similar studies entailing the elderly – but no research regarding college-aged students. She set out to remedy that situation with a 30-participant study gauging the correlation between students’ exercise frequency and intensity, and their GPA. Hulstein used the International Physical Activity Questions form to determine the students’ detailed exercise habits and compared those to self-reported grades.

The findings were decidedly clear: If you want to help your GPA, ditch the books for a bit and get up for some vigorous exercise. While the study worked with female non-athletes, the striking correlation delivered a strong message to all St. Thomas students who cite academic focus as a reason not to exercise at any given time.

“A lot of times I knew if I exercised it would be better for me overall,” Hulstein said. “But to really see that correlation firsthand in the St. Thomas community gives it more validity and volume.”

Community impact

Now an alum and working in the health care sector to help keep people in her community well, Hulstein finds her professional life tied on a daily basis to the ideas her research experience cultivated.

“I wanted to do something that would apply to people I spend my time around every day,” she said. “Something everyday individuals could apply to their life and have it be beneficial.”

Settling on research all her peers could relate to, Hulstein is an example of HHP’s emphasis on having students explore topics they’re passionate about. That not only helps prepare them for what career they may pursue, but fuels their desire to contribute something personally meaningful.

“That is important and empowering for the students,” Scibora said.

It also positions them to tap into their surrounding resources; many students conduct studies that aid in the proficiency of athletic teams they’re on (think, “A study on how one stretch versus another prepares sprinters to run the 100-yard dash.”) Other times – as in Hulstein’s case – the studies can help give knowledge to the entire student community the researchers are part of at St. Thomas.

“It’s likely to impact you more to see a study done with kids you go to school with,” Hulstein said. “A good chunk of students want a higher GPA. If they see evidence that can be as simple as taking a half hour to raise their heart rate, they’ll likely make some time for that. It’s different when it’s close to home.”

While St. Thomas is no longer technically “home” for Hulstein, she remains connected: She and Scibora have continued working with the research this fall and recently submitted the project to the American College of Sports Science’s annual conference. Its continued attention in the scientific community could add even more value to Hulsteins’ contribution, research that yielded exactly what she set out to find: something meaningful.

Strong, washboard abs. They’re on many people’s wish lists. But there’s more to a tight stomach than just vanity.

Athletes in particular rely on abdominal strength to excel in their sports.

Exercise science majors Rachel Britton and Marysa Meyer teamed up to see if abdominal strength plays a role in figure skaters’ ability to complete jump rotations.

“We know from our own experience that in figure skating, maintaining a strong core is key for holding one’s position while rotating midair in a jump or in a spin,” Rachel Britton explained.

For their 300-level biomechanics course, Britton and Meyer, who have been figure skating since they were in kindergarten, tested between 15 and 20 regional figure skaters ages 18 and older. The mix was comprised of “a jumble of athletes,” Meyer said, including members of the University of Minnesota hockey cheer squad and one 18-year-old elite skater from Britton’s home rink in Rochester, Minn.

Subjects voluntarily submitted recordings of themselves completing the most difficult jump they were able to land. Most fell into the single- and double-rotation range. Britton and Meyer then reviewed the footage to confirm the number of rotations each skater was able to complete.

There are six styles of jumps that ascend in difficulty: salchow, toe loop, loop, flip, lutz and axel. Axels are the highest of jumps in figure skating and the only jump in which the skater takes off forward. (Fun fact: Japan’s Midori Ito broke ground in women’s figure skating when she became the first female to land the prized triple axel in both professional competition in 1988 and at the Olympic games in 1992, earning the 4-foot-10-inch skater the nickname “the jumping flea.”)

The Rochester figure skater was the only subject in their study who could complete a triple jump (loop, toe loop and salchow). The pair admitted their greatest research challenge was tracking down skaters who could complete more than a single rotation.

“Most skaters are only able to complete single or double jumps; those who can land triple jumps are often at the elite or professional level. And very few elite competitors are able to land quadruple jumps,” Britton said.

To test for abdominal strength, they used what’s called a Layfayette manual muscle tester – a hand-held tool that measures the force a muscle exerts. They pressed the tool to each subject’s outer left and right clavicles to test left and right oblique (side abdominals) strength and one on the chest to test rectus abdominis strength (the washboard muscle). Then they asked subjects to lift and hold a basic crunch while they measured the subjects’ highest level of resistance.

What they were looking for was not how many sit-ups a subject could complete but “the highest level of opposition” the subject was able to resist while attempting a crunch, Meyer explained. “Maximum sit-ups measures endurance and that’s not what we were looking for,” she said.

The end result? “We were surprised that we did not find a correlation between abdominal strength and number of jump rotations a skater could complete,” Britton said. Both she and Meyer acknowledged that their sample size was a determining factor. She also noted that recreational figure skaters, in her experience, tend not to focus on core conditioning.

She added, “We knew it would be difficult to get conclusive results if we weren’t able to recruit enough skaters from each (single, double and triple jumpers) ability level.”

However, they also employed vertical jump height tests to gauge if there was a correlation between vertical jump height and whether a skater could complete a single or double jump. Unlike the abdominal strength tests, the jump-height results showed a correlation, though it was minimal.

“We tested for a correlation using a Pearson product-moment correlation test (a measure of the linear dependence between two variables) on Minitab 16 (statistical software used for analyzing data) between three groups of data: single vs. double jumpers, double vs. double-axel jumpers, and double-axel jumpers vs. single jumpers. No significant correlations were found for the latter groups, but a slight correlation was indicated among the single vs. double jumpers,” Britton said.

Though their study didn’t reveal significant results, Meyer said, “Our field is so hands on, so it’s important to get experience with all the technology our department is investing in. It’s really helpful in the learning process.”

Both Britton and Meyer will pursue advanced degrees in physical therapy after they graduate this spring.

If you had been passing by the biomechanics lab on the second floor of the Anderson Athletic and Recreation Complex on a recent cold April morning and glanced in the window, you might have stopped for a longer look. Students in that morning’s Kinesiology class sat at tables while perched on big blue stability balls. Most students gently moved back and forth and side to side atop the balls. A few students in the back row, however, bounced up and down a bit more enthusiastically, as they listened to a lecture about angle of muscle pull on bone.

Exercise science major and 2013 graduate Ann Goding could explain why the class was sitting on stability balls rather than sitting in chairs.

“Exercise both enlarges and increases plasticity of the hippocampus, allowing for increased neural activity and improved memory,” Goding says. “While the positive effects of an active lifestyle on the brain are well-known, little research has assessed the immediate influence of low-intensity, long-endurance exercise on the memory of an individual. When chairs were replaced with stability balls in kindergarten classrooms, on-task behaviors and comprehension rates improved. College students have not been as extensively tested to determine the connection between exercise and cognitive function so the goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between low-intensity, long-duration exercise and cognitive function through the use of stability balls in the college population.”

Goding’s research study is just one of many hands-on activities that take place during the academic year in the very busy Health and Human Performance Department. The current emphasis and increased level of student research is just one reflection of the many changes the department has experienced over the past five years.

Those changes include the development of five different yet related majors that focus on health and wellness, physical activity and exercise, as well as an explosion in the number of students selecting those majors, the hiring of new faculty, and a move into new classrooms and offices in the Anderson Athletic and Recreation Complex upon its opening.

“This department is not the old Physical Education Department from years past,” says College of Arts and Sciences Dean Terence Langan. “While we are fortunate to be able to continue to educate future teachers of physical education and health education, as well as personal trainers and health club managers, as we always have, more and more students are coming to us to study exercise science. Students are finding it to be a good preparation for entry into professional study in the health sciences, including especially physical therapy and occupational therapy, among others. As a result, the department is becoming more science-oriented.”

Andrew Eccles and Health and Human Performance professor Bridget Duoos help Kayla Westling put on the gear that will measure the pressure points on her feet during her golf swing. (Photo by Mark Brown)

The most popular of the department’s five majors is exercise science, which prepares students for careers in allied health-related fields or graduate school programs in areas such as physical therapy, athletic training, exercise physiology or biomechanics. The health promotion major readies students to work in the wellness and fitness industry or to enter occupational therapy graduate programs. The community health major prepares students for positions that deal with prevention of illness and disease or to seek a graduate degree in public health. Both the physical education and health education teaching majors train students to become certified K-12 teachers.

The exercise science major grew from 22 majors in 2003 to 160 in 2013. Drawing on allied course requirements in the departments of biology, chemistry and physics, HHP’s exercise science students also complete major field courses in kinesiology, biomechanics, exercise physiology, human anatomy and human physiology. All these courses are grounded in practical skills.

Robb Poutre, a 2013 exercise science graduate who intends to pursue a career as a physician, found that grounding useful.

“My favorite part of being an exercise science major at UST was the potential for practical application of everything I learned,” Poutre says. “The human body is such an incredible thing, so resilient, intricate, adaptable, delicate and tough all at the same time. Acquiring the knowledge and learning the methods necessary to understand the function of the human body is truly an invaluable thing. The ability to understand the different aspects of the human body across broad health situations is a base of knowledge that I get excited about.”

Not far behind exercise science in growth in number of majors is the health promotion major. This major jumped from 22 students in 2003 to 61 in 2013. One of the reasons for that increase has to do with career opportunities that now exist in the fitness industry. Programs that emphasize wellness, exercise and fitness for the elderly and the large baby-boomer populations that did not exist 25 years ago now are widespread and have created jobs for well-trained exercise science and health promotion majors.

While the Health and Human Performance Department has enjoyed the increase in number of students, the rapid growth has created challenges for the department, not least of which has been the need for more faculty. Adding urgency to this need was the unusual set of circumstances that engulfed the department from 2009 to 2011. In fall 2008, health educator John Rohwer was hired to serve as department chair and help longtime professors Dan Carey, an exercise physiologist, and Bridget Duoos, a biomechanist, move the department forward. Within two years, however, Carey was diagnosed with and died of a brain tumor, and Rohwer died in an accident.

“When John and Dan tragically died within a couple of months of each other it was a real blow to the department and to the College of Arts and Sciences,” recalls Langan. “However, given the rapidly growing student demand for health and human performance classes we needed to move quickly to hire new faculty. We have been fortunate to hire four excellent new full-time faculty members in the past three years, along with some very good new part-time faculty members.”

The department moved quickly in spring 2011 to hire Timothy Mead, who teaches physical education methodology courses, as well as personal health and wellness. His current research interest is in studying the effectiveness of exercise on the academic performance of school children. In his courses, Mead minimizes lecturing and emphasizes hands-on active learning, a practice that is increasingly a keystone for all of the department’s courses.

Jolynn Gardner joined the department in fall 2011, specializing in community health. Her areas of research include stress management, obesity, and coping with grief and loss. Gardner frequently uses a project-based approach in the courses she teaches since one challenging aspect of a public health career is translating scientific research into information and advice that are readily understood by community members. To practice this skill, Gardner’s students create blogs that translate current public health research into relevant, realistic information and advice for the public.

“Public health is an exciting, growing field, and the professional opportunities abound,” Gardner says. “Public health is also very broad, so there are opportunities for virtually every student’s area of interest as well, whether it be obesity prevention, infectious disease control, drug abuse prevention, promotion of fitness or health care policy reform, to name just a few.”

Paul Mellick began teaching exercise physiology courses in the department in fall 2012 and established a laboratory that allows him to pursue research into the hormonal regulation of glucose metabolism. His primary research involves high-intensity exercise such as sprinting, weight training or short-term exhaustive exercise and metabolism, and he studies how this type of exercise affects metabolism, specifically blood glucose regulation and insulin action. This includes the relationships between high-intensity exercise and diabetes as well as high-intensity exercise and performance-enhancement.

This fall, Lesley Scibora joined the department to teach human anatomy courses. Scibora’s areas of expertise include being a health care provider as a doctor of chiropractic and work as an exercise physiologist. Her primary research interests involve the interaction of body weight, physical activity and bone strength.

“I am interested in understanding what factors influence bone health in overweight and obese individuals, and how bone strength is affected by weight loss through traditional behavioral and surgical methods,” Scibora says. “It is important to find ways for individuals to become physically active in ways that are sustainable and beneficial to both their bones and overall health.”

Hiring well-qualified faculty has made it possible for the department to continue curricular revisions in all of its majors, a process that had been initiated in 2010 and will continue through spring 2014. Except for pre-professional physical and health teacher education majors who do a student teaching experience, all HHP majors now must complete a 100-hour internship experience that places them in a variety of career-related settings. Those internships range from working with a professional athletic team to assisting disabled individuals with training programs. Another curricular revision involves adding laboratory requirements to courses in biomechanics and advanced physiology that will have students actively engaged in learning and practicing skills with state-of-the-art equipment. The faculty believe that the addition of lab time to these courses will not only have an impact on students’ learning in the courses themselves but also will have the effect of expanding the scope and depth of the research that students conduct in the required exercise science research methods course.

The equipment used by Eccles creates a 3D map of the pressure points of a golfer’s feet, allowing careful analysis of how those pressure points affect a golf swing. (Photo by Mark Brown)

Helping to make lab requirements possible has been the commitment of the College of Arts and Sciences to provide funding to buy research-quality equipment. Peter Parilla, a longtime sociology professor and former associate dean who is currently serving as the department’s interim chair, says, “The increased emphasis on lab-based courses and on student research places added pressure on making sure that the department has state-of-the-art-research equipment. We are still building these resources but have made significant progress, thanks to the support of Dean Langan.”

Several years ago the department purchased access to a sophisticated program called Anatomy TV. In laboratory classes in the human anatomy and human physiology courses, students are now able to do virtual cadaver dissection and access MRI, X-ray and CT scans through this program. Students can study the structure of bone from the inside out, add layers of muscles to a skeleton, rotate the structure and see the origin and insertion of the muscle. Students also can watch skeletons performing fundamental movements such as walking and sitting and see how a muscle functions throughout the movement. Students are further able to analyze movement in their kinesiology and biomechanics courses by using video cameras and motion analysis programs available to them. In the department’s computer lab, students can download video and then watch movements in slow motion, measure joint angles and provide feedback regarding the movement. Students can digitize movement to get velocities and accelerations of limbs and joint angles.

Another recent equipment addition to the department are pedar-x pressure insoles that can be slipped into any shoe, such as a running shoe, hockey skate or golf shoe, to measure pressure changes over the entire foot surface as a person progresses through a movement. This program can be synched with video to provide students an even more thorough analysis.

In the biomechanics lab, Nintendo Wii platforms and software from AgileMedicine allow students to learn how to measure postural sway in athletes who have experienced concussions. The exercise physiology lab added a treadmill and metabolic cart that allow students to learn how to conduct a maxVO2 test that determines the maximal amount of oxygen a person is able to consume and get to the working muscles during exercise. A freezer at minus 80º Celsius (minus 117.40º F) recently was added to the lab so blood and tissue variables can be studied and stored without degradation or metabolic activity.

The faculty eagerly anticipates the addition of the Bod Pod as well as the computed tomography (CT) machine next year. The Bod Pod uses whole-body densitometry to determine body composition of an individual. In approximately five minutes of sitting in the BodPod, the amount of fat and fat-free mass that makes up a person can be determined. The computed tomography machine will allow for an X-ray scan to be done of a body part. HHP faculty anticipates using it to determine the effect of exercise on bone.

“The enthusiasm that the faculty has for research has clearly been contagious,” Parilla says. “Students are clearly motivated and excited to participate.” The access to research-quality equipment makes it possible to engage larger numbers of students in conducting that research with real life applications.

If you were to visit the HHP department, you could work your way down the hallway and read student research posters that are the culminating results of research studies conducted in biomechanics and exercise science courses. While the exercise science major has a long history of conducting undergraduate research, the addition of dedicated faculty and research quality equipment means the department can help students conduct studies that can be presented at national conferences and submitted for publication in professional journals.

When Goding tested her fellow students sitting on the large stability balls in their Kinesiology class, she found they experienced slight improvements in reaction times but no improvement in verbal or visual memory, cognitive efficiency index or impulse control.

Duoos, a long-time proponent of student research, says, “Participating in such experiences in exercise science is virtually unheard of at the Division III undergraduate level. I am thrilled to see the addition of faculty and equipment to the program and am eagerly looking forward to the high level of research more students will be able to undertake.”

The HHP faculty share that vision, imagining a day when the program will be recognized as a leading undergraduate program nationally. Scibora speaks for the faculty when she says, “We hope that students will continue to be drawn to the program because of excellent learning environments, from the classroom to hands-on experiences and high-level research opportunities that provide both the HHP department and its graduates a competitive edge.”

Matthew Sanford and Dr. Bruce Kramer, two unique figures in the fast-emerging subject of mind-body consciousness, will meet on stage at the University of St. Thomas on Tuesday, Oct. 29, for a rare discussion about living and dying in our bodies.

Bruce Kramer

“Everything in its Place: Mind-Body Dialogues,” moderated by Cathy Wurzer of Minnesota Public Radio News’ “Morning Edition,” will touch on a wide variety of topics on the mind-body relationship, including disability, health care, mental health, caregivers and faith.

The event begins at 7:30 p.m. in Woulfe Alumni Hall of the Anderson Student Center on the university’s St. Paul campus. The program, free and open to the public, is being recorded for later broadcast by Twin Cities Public Television.

The evening is being sponsored by an alliance of several diverse departments, schools and programs across St. Thomas and St. Catherine University.

St. Thomas sponsors are: University Lectures Committee; Active Minds; College of Arts and Sciences; Communication and Journalism; Counseling and Psychological Services; Department of Special Education and Gifted Education; Disability Resources; Family Studies; Graduate School of Professional Psychology; Health and Human Performance; Leadership, Policy and Administration; Organizational Leadership and Development; Philosophy; Program for Neuroscience; Psi Chi; Psychology Department; Teacher Education; Theology Department; and Wellness Center.

Matthew Sanford

St. Catherine sponsors are the Henrietta Schmoll School of Health and Master of Arts in Holistic Health Studies.

Both Sanford and Kramer write blogs and speak publicly on the topic. Both use a wheelchair. Sanford has been a paralyzed from the chest down for the last 35 years. He is an award-winning author, health care innovator, yoga instructor and founder of the nonprofit Mind Body Solutions.

Kramer, former dean of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling at St. Thomas, was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) in late 2010. He launched his blog, Dis Ease Diary, shortly after. Commonly called “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” after the famed New York Yankees player, ALS is a neurodegenerative disease affecting nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain, characterized by progressive weakness. Life expectancy averages two to five years after diagnosis.

With more than 70 blog posts to date, Kramer writes in personal detail about his life with ALS, often on themes of love, priorities, faith and friends. Wurzer has featured him on “Morning Edition” in the series Bruce Kramer: Living with ALS.

Cathy Wurzer

Kramer knows Sanford from taking adaptive yoga lessons through Mind Body Solutions. (Both can be heard together on this Living with ALS segment.)

While Sanford is Kramer’s yoga instructor, both consider the other his teacher. When Kramer introduced Sanford to faculty known to have similar interests, the potential for collaboration prompted the group to continue meeting.

The Oct. 29 public dialogue is one such collaboration. It is intended to encourage discussion of yoga, meditation, mindfulness and other mind-body practices among students, faculty and staff.

Sanford, author of Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, founded Mind Body Solutions in 2002. The Minnetonka-based nonprofit helps people with physical disabilities become healthier, happier and more effective in meeting daily challenges.

Students are invited to check out a new four-credit course offering for spring 2013: Global Health, HLTH 310, CRN 21728.

Students will research and uncover solutions to global health issues from a community-health framework. This foundational perspective will allow students to apply their learning on an international scale.

“Healthy Minnesota: Communities in Action,” a program designed to showcase and celebrate some of the state’s best examples of community-based programs that promote healthy living, will be held Friday afternoon, Sept. 28, at the Ramada Mall of America in Bloomington.

A poster session featuring displays about programs designed to improve the health and well-being of Minnesotans will run from 3 to 6:30 p.m.

“Getting Communities Into Action,” a panel discussion led by Dr. Ed Ehlinger, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Health, will run from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Panelists will include representatives from:

Do.town, a collaboration of Bloomington, Edina, Richfield, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Healthy Community Partnership, sponsored by Allina Health System.

The panel discussion will be followed by comments from Dave Durenberger, former U.S. senator and now senior health policy fellow at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.

Dr. Regina BenjaminU.S. Surgeon General

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin will give the closing remarks. Benjamin, who holds an M.B.A. from Tulane University, studied medicine at the University of Alabama and the Morehouse School of Medicine. She oversees 6,500 uniformed public health officers in the United States and around the world.

“I strongly believe in the importance of empowering individuals to make healthy choices,” Benjamin said recently. “That’s one of four strategic directions of the National Prevention Strategy that aims to transform our health care system into one that rewards prevention.”

The program is free and open to the public, but registration is required. For information on how to register, send an email to medmba@stthomas.edu.

“Healthy Minnesota: Communities in Action” is being organized by the Health Care MBA Program in the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas in conjunction with the Minnesota Public Health Association. The event is being coordinated by two students in the MBA program, Laura Templin-Howk and Tina Morey.